Ice Cream Blonde

You might remember Thelma Todd, the "Ice Cream Blonde," from her appearances in Marx Brothers movies. 

She so attracted men that, at age 15, Thelma was fired from her job as a dime-store clerk in Lawrence, Massachusetts, because the owner disapproved of the fellas lurking in his aisles.

Jobless, Thelma enrolled in teacher's college and began entering beauty contests for cash.

A Lawrence theater manager spotted her at a tryout for the Miss America pageant and wired Thelma's photo to a Paramount Pictures executive in Hollywood. 

The 20-year-old's career path was settled, overnight. For her part, she was glad for the opportunity, glad to get away from Lawrence, and glad to get away from an abusive Irish father.

Her first movie role (as a dance-hall girl) was in 1926's God Gave Me 20 Cents.

On the beach at Malibu

Studio-head Hal Roach noticed her in the film and quickly plunked Thelma into his Laurel and Hardy comedies. 

She was so funny on screen, Roach soon gave Thelma her own series of slapstick shorts, and began loaning her to other studios, which was how she wound up playing with the Marx Brothers.

Thelma made, in total, 50 films in less than nine years. 

But she knew her looks wouldn't last, and did what many aging Hollywood stars do: she opened a gambling casino.

Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Café—a 15,000-square foot nightclub on the ground floor of her Malibu home—proved an immediate sensation among tourists, screenwriters, celebrities, studio executives, gangsters, and gamblers. 

It appeared Thelma was now set for life.

But it wasn't to be.

The Ice Cream Blonde had a dark side.

An inveterate "party girl," Thelma drank heavily and played around with married men. She dated mobsters; eloped with one, then got divorced and took up with another. She cracked up cars and was arrested for drunk driving. And she gobbled amphetamines to fend off weight. (Hal Roach inserted into her studio contract the proviso that she'd be fired if she gained five pounds; he named it the "Potato Clause.") The amphetamines made her manic.

Friends said she was drawn to dangerous men, men who, like her father, were physically abusive.

Thelma was found dead by her maid on the morning of December 16, 1935, her body wedged behind the wheel of her Lincoln, which was parked in the garage of her business partner and lover, who lived next door to the casino. 

The Lincoln had been running, and the garage door closed, when the maid came upon her.

The actress's nose and mouth were bloody.  

A grand jury ruled the 29-year-old actress's death was a suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning.

The ruling came despite the fact that an autopsy revealed Thelma had a broken nose, bruised throat, and two cracked ribs; and despite the fact that none of her acquaintances believed she was suicidal.

In the trunk of Thelma's Lincoln, the grand jury was informed, were wrapped Christmas presents, meant for lovers, friends and family.

Postscript: In 1987, Hal Roach (age 90) told writer Marvin Wolf that three Los Angeles sheriff's detectives visited him the day after Thelma Todd's death and told him her business partner and lover had confessed to murdering the actress. Roach, wanting no scandal, advised the detectives to cover up the crime. "I told them I thought they should forget about it," Roach said. "He wouldn't have gone to jail anyway." Thelma's partner and lover confessed to the murder a second time 16 years later, while on his deathbed.

Organized Lightning

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

— George Carlin

Three times a week I receive "stim" during physical therapy.

Stim (electrical stimulation) is used on patients whose injuries cause pain or curb mobility.

To apply stim, the therapist tapes electrodes to the patient's skin, connects them to the stim machine, and dials up the current, until the patient cries uncle. He or she will feel a strong tingling sensation wherever the electrodes have been placed.

"Medical electricity" like stim has been in use since 1744, when it was unveiled in Europe as a branch of "experimental philosophy."

Propelled by amusing experiments and the invention of the Leyden jar in 1746, British, French, German and Italian "electricians" began touting electricity's miraculous healing properties, playing to crowds that assembled at soirées and in theaters, churches and temples to witness "this new fire that man produced from himself, and which did not descend from heaven." 

One professor of medicine and philosophy in Germany, Johann Gottlob Krüger, claimed electrical shocks could be used, in particular, to treat palsy. Soon thereafter, electricians claimed shocks could be used to treat other maladies, including paralysis, tetanus, tumors, gout, rheumatism, toothaches, headaches, menstrual cramps, sleepwalking, fevers, tics, ulcers, and St Anthony’s fire.

Instrument-makers soon flooded the market with portable medical devices that delivered shocks, and in 1756 the first textbook in English on medical electricity was published.

Two centuries later, psychiatrists discovered another application for medical electricity: electroconvulsive therapy, generally known as "shock treatment."

Invented in Italy in the 1930s, shock treatment uses electrical jolts to induce seizures. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, shock treatment was used worldwide to treat depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and homosexuality. Its use declined during the 1980s, although an estimated 100,000 Americans are still treated annually through shock therapy today.

While shock treatment has declined, there's an emergent form of medical electricity: "electroceuticals."

Electroceuticals are small medical devices that are attached to the skin or surgically implanted. They emit electrical impulses that fire up or quiet down neurons, and are used to treat such maladies as heart disease, diabetes, incontinence, high blood pressure, obesity, chronic pain, and arthritis.

While still considered experimental, electroceuticals hold the promise of working miracles.

Miracle-wise, however, no application of medical electricity can compare to that found in Frankenstein—the movie versions, anyway.

The novel's author, Mary Shelley, had in mind an alchemist, not an electrician, when she penned Frankenstein in 1817.

Although familiar with medical electricity through demonstrations by the philosopher Luigi Galvani, in which he passed an electrical current through the nerves of a corpse, Shelly based the novel on folktales about an eccentric German alchemist, Johann Konrad Dippel, who claimed he'd discovered the "elixir of life."

Dippel, who lived in Frankenstein Castle, liked to stitch together bodies from the parts of dead animals and try to bring them to life with chemical compounds.

Bystanders

Business leaders cannot be bystanders.

— Howard Schultz

Bought anything lately?

Corporate waste and failure seem the norm.

Appointments aren't kept. Emails go ignored. Phone calls aren't returned. Quotes are inaccurate. Packages never arrive. Products don't work. Bills are wrong. Customers are scolded. Customers are spammed.

Everything is broken.

They wouldn't be, if business leaders stopped confining themselves to the corner office, indifferent to the constant missteps their employees make.

They wouldn't be if business leaders started leading alongside their employees, and stopped being bystanders.

Far too many business leaders are bystanders today, content just to manage risk, instead of serving customers.

An incident recounted in Nightmare Scenario, the new book about the Trump Administration's mismanagement of the Covid-19 outbreak, brought the problem home to me.

You will recall how, last February, the same month Trump tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," the Atlanta-based CDC issued hundreds of test kits—kits that turned out to malfunction by producing false positives.

In hindsight, the failure came just when accurate testing was most needed.

And what did the leaders of HHS do? They convened in Washington for three weeks to debate not what, but who was to blame, and how to cover up the failure.

Only when the head of the FDA at last sent an immunologist to Atlanta to see how the kits were being assembled did those leaders learn who was to blame—and, most importantly, why.

CDC's own lab techs turned out to be the culprits. Unsupervised, they were assembling the test kits on the same tables where they were examining samples of Covid-19, contaminating the kits with the live virus. That stupid mistake guaranteed the kits would produce false positives.

How many cases of Covid-19 might have been prevented if the leaders of HHS, instead of bystanding for nearly a month, had visited the CDC lab right away?

For the sake of contrast, consider Churchill, a boots-on-the-ground leader.

Schooled as a cavalryman and war correspondent, Churchill was obsessed with fact-finding, an obsession that served him well during World War II.

In his Memoirs, Churchill's chief advisor "Pug" Ismay recounts how, at the slightest hint of a snafu, the peripatetic prime minister would rush to the scene of the action, often to his bodyguards' chagrin.

During the war, Churchill inspected air fields, air raid shelters, rifle ranges, gun encasements, tank factories, dock yards, shipyards, submarine pens, encampments, fortresses, battlefields, smashed villages, fallen bridges, and countless bombed-out buildings.

During one Nazi air raid over London, he visited fighter command’s ops room to observe the progress of the battle on a huge plotting board, whispering to Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."

Churchill would say that his fact-finding trips were "reconnoiters" rife with the "refreshment of adventure."

Before Churchill, Lincoln—the only sitting US president to come under enemy fire during a war—behaved in a similar way. 

Lincoln was literally a boots-on-the-ground leader.

CEOs, please take a page from Churchill and Lincoln.

Don't just be bean-counting bystanders. There's more to business than risk management. There are—duh—customers.

Get out of the corner office once in a while.

At the first sign of trouble, get your damn boots on the ground. 

Lead alongside your employees—and fix what's broken.

Lost

Marry I will not, for my affections were buried in the grave.

— James Buchanan

Last month, C-SPAN—continuing a tradition inaugurated in 1948 by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.—again asked professional historians to rank America's presidents.

Once more, James Buchanan ranked as the worst.

Critics of the survey charge the historians with presentism. 

But it's hard to dispute a finding based on 142 respondents' answers, or the fact that Buchanan has wound up the biggest loser in nearly every survey since 1948. 

Buchanan has consistently ranked at or near the bottom of the ranking survey because he hastened the American Civil War. 

He left the presidency in 1861 with the nation already split in two, the pro-slavery Confederacy and anti-slavery Union.

Buchanan's presidency might never have happened had Ann Coleman learned 40 years earlier to ease her drug use.

Ann was a looker and—better still—an enormously wealthy one. 

Her father was among the richest citizens of the young Buchanan's hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and perhaps the richest man in the state. 

A rising attorney, Buchanan zeroed in on the comely Ann, Lancaster's undisputed "catch" of 1819.

After a whirlwind courtship, the couple became engaged—despite Ann's father's objections—in the summer of that same year.

But, as it turned out, the greedy and ambitious Buchanan was a neglectful fiancé. He spent the evening hours working in his law office, left town for months at a time, and even failed to write when away. 

He also had a wandering eye. 

Ann was so pained by her fiancé's neglect—and the town gossip about him—that she broke off their engagement in December, moved to Philadelphia, and turned to quaffing laudanum, the 19th century's equivalent of OxyContin.

Within only days, she overdosed and died. 

Her presiding physician, keen to quell any talk of suicide, attributed Ann's death to female hysteria.

Lancaster's gossips immediately began to call Buchanan a murderer and Ann's father refused his request to see her body or attend her funeral. 

Buchanan became distraught, swore off ever marrying, and fled Lancaster for Washington, DC, where he devoted his life to politics—a devotion that led, 35 years later, to the White House. 

He always told people Ann's death had left his life "a dreary blank," but gossips and political opponents claimed Buchanan—America's only bachelor president—was in fact gay.

The secretive Buchanan still possessed Ann Coleman's love letters when he died in 1868. 

Per his will, the letters were burned by the executors of Buchanan's estate.

Character is Not for Sale: Why I Hate SUVs.

A man should give us a sense of mass.

— Emerson

When deciding whether to grant a security clearance to someone, our intelligence agencies take into account what they call the "whole person;" not merely the record of his or past behaviors, but their sum total—the sort of actor they represent.

We'd call that sum total character.

Bankers actually do call it that. Character to bankers is one of the "Five Cs," the five factors they consider when deciding whether to make a loan.

Character to a banker amounts to stability—how long you’ve lived at your current address, how long you’ve been in your current job, and how promptly you pay your bills. Bankers want to know you're steady, trustworthy, and likely to repay the loan.

Writer Tom Wolfe called character "the right stuff," an ineffable "it," a je ne sais quoi that blends combat-tested chutzpa with a self-effacing style. More than just a track-record of stability, the right stuff comprises the Hemingwayesque knack for demonstrating "grace under pressure." As astronaut Wally Schirra said of the right stuff, "it's something you can't buy."

Emerson called character the "genius by whose impulses a man is guided;" a genius, he said, as likely to rear its head in business as on the battlefield (Emerson didn't anticipate space flight).

"The face which character wears to me is self-sufficiency," the philosopher said. "A man should give us a sense of mass. Our action should rest mathematically on our substance."

Character as substance: I like that definition. I see it on quiet display every day—particularly among the many businesspeople I know who are struggling to emerge whole from the pandemic. Although they don't say it, they worry as much about their employees', suppliers', and customers' futures as their own; often more so.

They know character amounts to taking one right step after another, even when the path is rocky and uncertain. 

Now that's the right stuff.

Unfortunately, too many other Americans think the right stuff is for sale and that you can buy it—in the form of an SUV.

SUVs continue to push sedans out of the American automotive market, because they make their owners feel "important" and "safe," according to consumer research conducted automakers.

That research shows these Americans are, in the researchers' words, "self-oriented" and "crime-fearing." 

In other words, selfish and paranoid.

When behind the wheel, SUV drivers, according to the research, believe, "I'm in control of the people around me." And they show it by hogging the road; driving aggressively; lane-changing recklessly; parking thoughtlessly; and eyeing you with contempt at all times.

SUVs, in turn, are designed by Detroit to feed their drivers' warped, apocalyptic fantasies. Resembling the armored cars starring in Mad Max movies, SUVs are fierce, furious and overfed weapons of brutal destruction. 

I hate SUVs; and, by extension, their cowardly, hoggish and self-important drivers. 

And I have a message for them.

Character is not for sale.

Above: Bust by John Francis Murray.